Street harassment is a serious problem facing women in American cities.

How do I know?

I guess I don't, really.

I've rarely seen it. A few times in college, men hollered at friends from passing cars. A boss's boss at a job I'd held for less than a week made a gross comment to the hostess at the restaurant where he had just bought me lunch. A few years ago, a homeless person said unprintable things to a woman as I was walking past.

Other than that, I've never seen a woman publicly harassed. Still, I am convinced that women are subtly victimized as they walk Chicago streets, ride Chicago trains and drink at Chicago bars.

A Cornell University study says 77 percent of women under 40 have been followed by a man or group of men to the point they felt unsafe. More than half of survey respondents reported experiencing harassment before turning 15. Half said they had been groped or fondled in the past year.

Gfk, a German market research firm, said in a report for a street-harassment activist group that 65 percent of women report harassment, with almost 1 in 4 reporting unwanted sexual touching.

The women in these studies are our mothers, sisters, daughters, partners and friends. Yet we as men rarely speak out. Why?

Women — many of them — have told me the barrage is constant. Groped in broad daylight on Michigan Avenue. Hissed at. Followed. My mother, years ago, was stalked by someone who rode the same Metra train.

Still, for years I thought the stories I heard must be exaggeration. If this happened with any frequency, I would notice it. I would stop it.

Then the Internet's megaphone turned the volume up on these stories, starting with a video of a woman being harassed in Manhattan that first piqued my curiosity. I started asking around, online and in person.

A hidden camera video posted to YouTube in October 2014 highlighted the catcalls a woman recieved walking the streets of New York City.

A hidden camera video posted to YouTube in October 2014 highlighted the catcalls a woman recieved walking the streets of New York City.

Women I trust poured out their stories, sometimes with tears welling or anger boiling hard enough to smack a fist on the table.

There is so much smoke, the fire must be an inferno.

So why can't I see it? Many women say men are much less likely to harass a woman who has a male escort.

And many women don't raise the red flag when it happens because they are practiced in the art of ignoring.

I was once with a date when a man squeezed her thigh under an abutting bar section as we were speaking to each other. I couldn't see it happen and she didn't tell me until he left. If she had, I probably would have knocked him off his stool, but she didn't want to make a big deal out of it. It happens sometimes, she told me.

This will seem a brag, but once I dated a woman who modeled. She is stunningly gorgeous. (Whip-smart, too, but for our purposes, her physical beauty is the relevant bit.) Surely she would get approached, catcalled, bothered constantly, while I was around? Never. Not once when I was there, she told me, despite it being a fairly common occurrence for much of her life. After a lifetime in Chicago, she moved to Los Angeles where she said things have gotten better, but mostly because she is rarely in communal spaces with men after trading her CTA pass for a motorcycle and the freeway.

Most men I know — smart, considerate, kind men — have told me they've rarely seen street harassment, though they, too, see symptoms. "Cosplay is not consent" signs posted at a comic convention so turned my cousin's stomach he brought it up during Sunday football talk. They believe it happens, but they doubt the breadth of the problem.

Well, boys, believe it. It happens, and with great frequency. And we should be doing something about it. What it is we should do is trickier.

The Chicago Transit Authority recently launched an anti-harassment campaign, urging riders to report if they or others are being harassed on buses and trains. Unless someone is in imminent need of police, the CTA is saying fellow riders should speak up and intervene if another passenger is being harassed — to aid the other person but partly to put the offender on blast: This won't be tolerated.

If only it were that simple. A caveat for women who wish men would say something when they are harassed: The least likely thing to happen when a man reproaches another publicly is that the behavior will suddenly change. He might not do it again that day or that hour, but it likely will not stop.

It’s possible the harasser gets even more confrontational. Maybe he’s drunk. Maybe a fist, or a knife, or a gun comes out, like it did in the Austin neighborhood in October when a man was shot and killed after he reproached the shooter’s brother for grabbing his girlfriend’s butt at a party, according to prosecutors.

Public chastisement might be the right thing to do, but it's not the easiest, nor is it the safest.

The right thing to do would have been to tell my boss he was a jerk on my third day of work. Would you have done that? If I had, I doubt I would be writing this column. I'm not losing sleep.

If half our free society can't walk public streets and feel safe, that makes the other half pathetic excuses for men, even if we are not doing the harassing. We can't live other men's lives for them, but we can be a supportive voice and understanding ear when it happens. We can stop making feelings of disrespect or even outright fear worse by compounding them with our doubt.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 31, 2015, in the News section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Street harassment is real, guys, just ask any female, like Mom" —
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